I switched away from Gmail to Fastmail earlier this year. Superb service so far, no stress with spam or any outages that I am aware of. But they lacked support for a proper contact synchronization until now. Their own custom solution was a read only service, so I stuck with Google for handling contacts.

Today they finally announced support for CardDAV. So far it works like a charm using the Mac Contacts.app and on the iPhone. Importing the contacts from Gmail worked almost flawlessly – the contact images went missing.